The present invention relates to a method of punching a circular or rectangular minute hole having a diameter or a long side of not greater than about 0.5 mm at a metal board by using an upper die and a lower die. The present invention also relates to a method and an apparatus for manufacturing a liquid ejection head using such a punching method.
An ink jet recording head (hereinafter, referred to as “recording head”) used as an example of a liquid ejection head is provided with a plurality of series of flow paths reaching nozzle orifices from a common ink reservoir via pressure generating chambers in correspondence with the orifices. Further, the respective pressure generating chambers need to form by a fine pitch in correspondence with a recording density to meet a request of downsizing. Therefore, a wall thickness of a partition wall for partitioning contiguous ones of the pressure generating chambers is extremely thinned. Further, an ink supply port for communicating the pressure generating chamber and the common ink reservoir is more narrowed than the pressure generating chamber in a flow path width thereof in order to use ink pressure at inside of the pressure generating chamber efficiently for ejection of ink drops.
According to a related-art recording head, a silicon substrate is preferably used in view of fabricating the pressure generating chamber and the ink supply port having such small-sized shapes with excellent dimensional accuracy. That is, a crystal surface is exposed by anisotropic etching of silicon and the pressure generating chamber or the ink supply port is formed to partition by the crystal surface.
Further, a nozzle plate formed with the nozzle orifice is fabricated by a metal board from a request of workability or the like. Further, a diaphragm portion for changing a volume of the pressure generating chamber is formed into an elastic plate. The elastic plate is of a two-layer structure constituted by pasting together a resin film onto a supporting plate made of a metal and is fabricated by removing a portion of the supporting plate in correspondence with the pressure generating chamber. Such a structure is disclosed in Japanese Patent Publication No. 2000-263799A.
Meanwhile, according to the above-described related-art recording head, since a difference between linear expansion rates of silicon and the metal is large, in pasting together respective members of the silicon board, the nozzle plate and the elastic plate, it is necessary to adhere the respective members by taking a long time period under relatively low temperature. Therefore, enhancement of productivity is difficult to achieve to bring about a factor of increasing fabrication cost. Therefore, there has been tried to form the pressure generating chamber at the board made of the metal by plastic working, however, the working is difficult since the pressure generating chamber is extremely small and the flow path width of the ink supply port needs to be narrower than the pressure generating chamber to thereby pose a problem that improvement of production efficiency is difficult to achieve.
Further, each of the pressure generating chambers needs to be bored with a communication port for communicating the pressure generating chamber and the nozzle orifice. However, the pressure generating chambers need to be aligned with a number of slender small elongated recess portions at a small pitch and with regard to the communication port, a number of small holes each having a small opening dimension need to align at bottom portions of the elongated recess portions at a small pitch. Therefore, the working is extremely difficult and the working with high accuracy is difficult to thereby pose a problem that improvement of production efficiency is difficult to achieve.